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0 points_ZeD_3y ago0 comments

I always have had problem with this definition... what do you mean by "implementation"? in my head "implementations" are "programs".

Like... "C" is a specification, "gcc" is an implementation. "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy", ... are implementations. "ECMAScript" is a specification, "webkit", "spidermonkey", ... are implementations.

"JavaScript" is a (trademarked) specification, and also "ECMAScript" and "JavaScript" are "very very similar" (wink wink)

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lloeki3y ago

> "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy"

Is Python-the-language fully specified now? Of course there are now a lot of PEPs, but I seem to recall (way back then, even before PEP3000 was a thing) that the Python "spec" was largely the "CPython" implementation (incl. bugs and all), and "CPython" was not actually a real name but emerged from a need to distinguish the original Python implementation from "Python-the-language" as well as alternative implementations such as PyPy, JPython/Jython, IronPython...

colordrops3y ago

Flash's ActionScript was also ab implementation of ECMAScript IIRC

Karliss3y ago

That's one thing I never understood. For me they seemed like completely different languages. Now looking at history in Wikipedia, it seems that old version of ActionScript was based on old version of ECMAScript specification. And ActionScript 2 which introduced strict typing and classes (that look nothing like JavaScript) was partially based on ECMAScript 4(which was abandoned as being too different from previous ECMAScript 3). Latest version of ECMAScript is 13. So at this point it seems like latest versions of JavaScript and ActionScript(3) have as much common as D and Rust. They shared early history but afterwards diverged quite a bit.

rezonant3y ago

How do you see them as diverged? I've spent a lot of time thinking about AS, ES4, and working with modern ES, and if anything I see them as having converged. The largest feature of ES4 that ES3 did not have was classes, which were added in ES6. The second largest feature was optional static typing. Optional static typing is nearly a defacto part of the language (from a community/ecosystem point of view) with the popularity of Microsoft's TypeScript superset.

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derefr3y ago

D20 is an open standard for a certain genre of tabletop role playing games, of which Dungeons and Dragons™ is an implementation. But D&D itself is an abstract concept, with two implementations: the open-game-licensed online “D20 SRD”, and the proprietary set of WotC-published core books.

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